Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Q/A with Secure-24's Josh Becigneul - DevCentral's Featured Member for September

Josh has
been working in the IT industry in various positions for a little over 10
years. He’s moved through various disciplines including MS server
administration, Linux, Networking, and now has been working primarily with F5
BIG-IPs. For the past 3 years he has focused on F5’s products and growing a
team of engineers to manage them. Secure-24 delivers managed IT operations,
application hosting and managed cloud services to enterprises worldwide.

DevCentral
got an opportunity to talk with Josh about his work, life and the importance of
being F5 Certified.

DevCentral:
You’ve been an active contributor to the DevCentral community and wondered what
keeps you involved?

Josh
Becigneul: DevCentral has helped me greatly over the years as I’ve worked with
F5 products, so I feel like it’s worth some of my time to spend both reading
posts and helping others in the community. When I started off it helped to be
able to explain a need and have someone create a basic iRule, or point me
towards documentation explaining something. Now that my skills have grown, I
want to pay it forward.

DC: Tell
us a little about the areas of BIG-IP expertise you have.

JB: I
started off on just BIG-IP LTM but over the years have grown into managing APM,
GTM, ASM, and sometimes a mix of each. I’ve worked with 1500’s, 1600s, 3600’s,
3900’s and VIPRION. As well as Enterprise Manager and now BIG-IQ too.

DC: You
are an ADC Engineer with Secure-24, an application hosting and cloud services
organization. Can you explain how DevCentral helps with your daily challenges?
Where does BIG-IP fit in the services you offer or within your own
infrastructure?

JB:
At Secure-24, BIG-IP has grown into an essential product for many portions of
our organization, along with many of our customers utilizing its services to
deliver their applications. We’ve got a large number of LTM customers, APM
customers and we’ve been growing into ASM. GTM provides advanced DNS services
for many of our customers around the globe. Most deployments using BIG-IP are
custom tailored to suit the needs of the particular customer. These can vary
from basic load balancing to advanced content steering, or small deployments of
a few virtual services to large ones comprised of hundreds.

With the
variety of F5 products in use, having a resource like DevCentral is invaluable
to our team. From being able to ask my peers questions about things, or
utilizing the codeshare and wiki to learn more about iRules and iControl, I
couldn’t imagine it not being available.

DC:
Describe one of your biggest BIG-IP challenges and how DevCentral helped in
that situation.

JB: One of
the most useful things iRules allow us to do is virtual hosting; running many
services behind a virtual service. Coupling this with APM allowed us to greatly
simplify remote access for us and our customers. For several customers, we used
APM to migrate them away from MS Forefront.

DC: I
understand you are an F5 Certified
Professional. Can you tell us about that and why you feel it is beneficial?

JB: Yes, I
first became F5 Certified in 2015 with my 201 Certified BIG-IP Administrator,
and followed that up at 2016’s F5 Agility conference by obtaining my 304 APM
Specialist. I feel it is beneficial because it helps to reinforce what I’ve
learned over the years, and (hopefully) lets my customers feel like they are in
good hands. (DC: Josh also recently passed the 302 GTM Exam!)

DC:
Lastly, if you weren’t an IT admin – what would be your dream job? Or better,
when you were a kid – what did you want to be when you grew up?

JB: I’d
probably be a roadie, and tour the world doing lights and sound for a huge
band!